Arev's research focuses on discourses of the modern nation-state, anxieties around racial and geographic belonging, land claims, and the deployment of human rights rhetoric in the Caucasus and Eastern Mediterranean. Arev earned an M.A. in Performance Studies at NYU, completing a thesis on transgender visual and performance art, mourning, and the progressive logic of neoliberal identity formation. Arev is also a founding member of the Hye-Phen Collective, a transnational, queer and feminist, diasporan Armenian media collective and e-zine.